Killing Vultures
| Date :18-Aug-2019 |
By ANSHUMAN BHARGAVA:
“As recently as the 1980s there were up to 80 million white-rumped vultures in India, but today the population numbers only a few thousands. In the Indian case, it was another type of inadvertent chemical poisoning that led the debacle for vultures.”
“Improving cross border collaboration, enforcement and building capacity for wildlife crime prosecution and improving the availability of information are crucial to stemming the decline in vulture population. In India, the situation is not much better than Botswana. Nine species of vulture can be found living in India, but most are now in danger of extinction after a rapid and major population collapse in recent decades.”
BIRDLIFE International is unequivocally condemning the recent poisoning of 537 Critically Endangered vultures by elephant poachers in the Central District of Botswana. This devastating incident has resulted in the country’s highest recorded death toll of vultures associated with a single poisoning incident and is one of the worst killings of vultures on the continent, rivalling a similar incident in the Caprivi area of Namibia in 2013, where between 400 and 600 vultures were killed. Although the Botswana Government appears to be stepping up its anti-poaching initiatives, catastrophic vulture mortality continues to occur because of poisoning by poachers.
Poachers poison vultures to stop them circling above carcasses — thus signalling their illegal activity. Targeted and non-targeted poisoning of vultures is escalating at an alarming rate across the continent, with a high number of incidents focused on southern Africa. Vultures play a vital role in our environment by cleaning up rotting carcasses that pose health risks and can contain harmful diseases such as tuberculosis and rabies. By doing this, vultures can help prevent the spread of diseases amongst humans and animals, and they do it for free. Improving cross border collaboration, enforcement and building capacity for wildlife crime prosecution and improving the availability of information are crucial to stemming the decline in vulture population. In India, the situation is not much better than Botswana. Nine species of vultures can be found living in India, but most are now in danger of extinction after a rapid and major population collapse in recent decades.
As recently as the 1980s, there were up to 80 million white-rumped vultures in India, but today, the population numbers only a few thousands. In the Indian case, it was another type of inadvertent chemical poisoning that led the debacle for vultures. Diclofenac is a common anti-inflammatory drug administered to cattle and is used to treat the symptoms of inflammation, fevers and/or pain associated with disease or wounds. It was widely used in India beginning in the 1990s. The drug is fatal to vultures and a vulture is exposed to a mortal dose of diclofenac if it eats from the carcass of an animal that has been treated with diclofenac. Following the findings on diclofenac, which came much late in itself due to lack of testing facilities in India and red-tape hurdles, the drug was banned for veterinary use in India on March 11, 2006; Nepal followed suit in and Pakistan shortly thereafter.
A replacement drug was developed and proposed after tests on vultures in captivity: Meloxicam that affects cattle the same way as diclofenac in treating maladies but is harmless for vultures. However, diclofenac for human use was still being diverted into veterinary uses through black markets in certain parts of India till 2010. Thus vultures continued to die till 2010-11 if the complete withdrawal of diclofenac from veterinary use is admitted. But it’s not just diclofenac, which is only one of over a dozen drugs known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) available in India. Meloxicam may be non-toxic to vultures. But we also know that four others, aceclofenac, carprofen, flunixin, ketoprofen and nimesulide are toxic. And their threat is far greater than diclofenac because they are all still legal and any move at banning them is bound to face stiff resistance from the strong lobby of pharmaceutical companies, as was the case with diclofenac, which took several years to see a complete ban.
The conservation measures were started late and we are still a long way to go to bring back vultures to a respectable number. The bird has been listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2002. The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS – BirdLife in India) and the RSPB (BirdLife in the UK), working as part of Saving Asia’s Vultures from Extinction (SAVE), have been monitoring these species since before the crash.
Every four years, they set out on a survey of epic proportions, covering 15,500 km of the road in 13 States across India, counting individual vultures of each of the three species. As per their estimates, the population of some of the species of vultures in the country has stabilised but the overall numbers are still pretty grim with no exceptional surge in their population through conservation measures like rising captive populations for breeding and ultimately repopulating the wild. This has also been taken up aggressively in India, Pakistan and Nepal since 2004-05. For a slow breeder like the vulture, which lays one egg at a time and has an eight-month breeding cycle, there is little scope for revival if the loss is more than 5 per cent a year, even as the actual loss is in the range of 40-45 per cent, leaving us with just around 20,000 vultures from millions that were there in the 80s.
The Government needs to chip in and do more to change the on-ground scenario. More vulture conservation and breeding centres need to be opened. The habitats need to be protected from intrusion or human interference for their safety. Vulture breeding sites continue to be destroyed for real estate, industry, infrastructure and other development projects. The Ken-Betwa river linking project, for instance, is going to destroy an important vulture nesting natural ecosystem. Clearance has also been accorded to a ropeway in Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary in Gujarat, a nesting site of critically-endangered long-billed vultures. The enhanced tourist activity is bound to drive the birds away. Transmission lines, wind turbines, barrages – everything can come on the way of safe breeding and conservation of the birds unless the Government takes steps to ensure that their habitats are protected.
There need to be strict rulings against any kind of constructions or activities in protected zones and natural habitats of the birds because it is a sure recipe for the destruction of their nesting place. By the way, we must remember that we are dealing here with an avian species that are endangered and on the brink where any neglect at this time can cause their complete extinction, causing grave loss to the human ecosystem and environment. This is a last-ditch effort to save them and the seriousness of the effort must show at the highest level.